Red Scare - Austism

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

The ladies are joined by Eron Wolf and Razib Khan in Austin to discuss the tech scene, the AI revolution and their new venture FUTO.

I had two breakfast tacos today. Are you, wait, wait, are you talking quietly on purpose? No. I'm going to have trouble hearing you. I'll talk louder. This is the register of the podcast. Okay, so it's like NPR. Hello, hi.

All right. So I should take my voice down. It's okay. Yeah, it's fine. You'll mix there. Testing, one, two, three. This is the register of the podcast. You just talk the way you want to talk.

Yeah. Like, he'll, he can, like, figure out the sound. You don't say? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, do you want to go again? I'll try to talk like this.

I'll try to keep it consistent. All right. Let's go. Are we recording? Oh, cool. We're back. We're in... Shh.

We're in Austin, Texas. we came to town for the Futo conference, and we have two special guests today. We have the CEO of Futo, Mr. Aaron Wolfe, and his director of operations, friend of the pod, returned guest, Rizib Khan. That was good. That was a good intro. This is very professional. I'm not used to having other people do everything for us.

Should we just, like, jump into it? Let's go. Yeah. Let's do it. I guess my first question for you guys is, what is Futo? What does it stand for? What kind of projects were you funding before? And what is your mission now?

Because I'm guessing none of our listeners have any idea who you guys are. Yeah? Yeah. So, I mean, Futo is kind of a reaction to the way that big tech companies have basically lost all respect for their customers or for the people using their software. So if you look at the way a company like Google puts all this R&D into things like the browser and Android and their search engine and all these things, and they do give us good tools, Gmail even.

You know, they do give us good tools, but we're not actually their customer. Their customer is marketers that want to influence our behavior. So that means they start doing all this creepy surveillance of our behavior while we're using the software and start learning how to influence us. And that's actually their product. The product that Google and Facebook are selling is us, the people. Right. There's like that adage that like if you're getting something for free, then you're the product.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm a, I'm just a software developer who like I do kind of see it as my, you know, As somebody who started programming at a young age, and I was able to write some software that people found useful, people liked. I do see it as my kind of mission in life is to write software for people like yourselves that you can enjoy it. And it's like there's an honest relationship between me or whatever company I'm working for, making software, and you enjoying the software.

So Futo's a software development company. Yeah, for the most part, yes. Most of the employees are engineers. Okay. And previously we're funding other people's projects and now you're embarking on your own projects. Is that the idea? That's fair to say. Futo really got going in 2021 and our first kind of endeavors were we found some fellows,

we found some companies to invest in. And that was basically based on, well, let's, just like, you know, I was looking at it from the standpoint of I have, you know, a lot of money. I don't really get interested in the sort of things that most venture capitalists would get excited about with the funding that I had. I was like, well, I just kind of want to build an organization that I would want to work at. Like, so. But in terms of like giving an elevator pitch to consumers to clients, what would that be? What kind of software are you developing?

What is your base, that sort of thing? So every day of software that you use. Like a browser? Well, we're helping somebody make a browser. There's things that are really hard to do. So a browser takes a ton of money and it's not clear how you can, how you can,

well, the browser, I guess maybe what I should say is there's a lot of work to do here. Like it's a whole computing ecosystem. The browser is part of it. We're working on different elements of the software we use every day. The most prominent thing that we have right now is our image product, which is basically what you get on your phone when you have an Android or iOS phone. You get a little application that you take photos.

You have photos on your phone. You usually put them in iCloud or Google Cloud. Our image product is, okay, what if I just want to, what if I don't want to give my photos to Big Tech? Well, I can run a Linux server and then I can put those photos on my own Linux server. So that's the kind of thing that we're trying to do. It's a software that you use every day. It is something that. So it would be like, sorry, I'm a little bit of a Luddite.

So say I. A little bit, a little bit? Say I don't want to put my photos on. the cloud, I could then download a different app and use that? You'd have to do, right now, this is all very difficult

right now. Right now you actually have to be able to run your own Linux server. We're working to make it so you don't have to do that. What is a Linux server? So Linux server is, so Linux is the operating system that kind of built Google and built Facebook, and it was done by

open source developers who actually just did it for love of the game. For love of the game. Linus Torvalds is just this really hardcore developer who just wanted to make an operating system and make it free for people. Unfortunately, what happened was companies like Google and Facebook and a company I worked for Yahoo, we wound up using software like that and then we build all these data collection services on top of it. But anybody can run Linux. So there's a lot of enthusiasts in the world. who do run Linux.

It's not that hard to do it. It takes, you know, if I walked you through the steps to run Linux, it would probably take, you know, take us a half an hour for you to get Linux running on a little server in your home. Problem is it does take maintenance, so you'd have to... A server in my home? Well, I guess that's the question. This is the way the Internet was, yeah.

My sense is that most, like, consumers would be happy to trade their privacy and data in exchange for, like, the... consolidation, the centralization, the convenience, yes. The tech platforms offer them. And I think even when they're made aware of all the horrible breaches and abuses, they don't care. I don't really care, but how do you sell a product like this. And this is what I'm telling people all the time, because there's so many kind of nerds out there who are building stuff. And they're like, because the people who do care about it, they're like, oh, well, we built this and it works great for me.

And then if you try to use it, you're like, this is a pain in the ass. I'm just going to use what's easy. Well, we should make it easy. If we made it easy, you might use it. If it's easy as Google, you might use it. If you just had a choice, the real choice you have to make, hopefully if we can execute on building the good products is, well, instead of having, you know, I buy an Android phone for really cheap

and then I get all the stuff for free and I'm getting surveilled and, like, manipulated, and I see ads. Well, what if you spent a little bit more? and you got something that was just as good and just as easy and convenient, but it didn't do all the surveillance of you. Like that's kind of what we're hoping that we can get people to make that decision.

And maybe you're, I mean, there's going to be a lot of people or just whatever. I'm going to take the cheapest thing. Well, what is like, I guess the, like, alarmist doomsday big tech scenario that you are trying to combat? Like what's, I know that like, yeah, you might not want to be surveilled.

you might not want to be manipulated, but like what's the real harm? I mean, it's the consolidation of power, ultimately. It's about, you know, big companies, big tech works. Okay, just sorry to interrupt, but like, well, I mean, consolidation of power, the de-platforming that we saw five years ago, for example, of a bunch of people, you know, around five years ago. That's because the big companies, there's like, you know,

four or five of them that control your social media presence. Well, if they just decide to X you out, what are you going to do about it? You don't have your own unique position place. You know, back in the 1990s, people had their own, you know, worldwide web page and all these, like, little homebrewed things that they would have. And that was very decentralized. And it was also a situation where, you know, there wasn't, I mean, there were ways that, you know, the web hosts could remove the pages. I mean, but it was kind of a pain in the butt.

Whereas, like, okay, like you put all your information in, or like you use Twitter as your primary medium of communicating with the world. well, I mean, you could just be disappeared really quickly, as a lot of people were. Yeah, I mean, I can see that. But I think even in terms of something like, you know, when you get like algorithmically served ads, which can be annoying and a nuisance, but very often those ads are like pertinent and relevant. I've clicked through to bought stupid bullshit on the internet on that. Now, obviously, this tech is a world that attracts a lot of people who are like anti-authoritarian, anarchist libertarian and stuff like that.

but are we just talking about like swapping one set of gatekeepers out for a new set of gatekeepers and who decides who the gatekeepers are in that scenario? So you don't have to do it that way. You know, Google consciously, when they built something like YouTube, they consciously made it so that they would be the gatekeepers. We are building things in a way that there are no gatekeepers. So for instance, like YouTube could have easily done this when they built themselves up. Well, there's one recommendation engine for YouTube.

That's it. If you go back 10 years before YouTube or five years before YouTube, if you uploaded anything, you'd have six search engines that were competing fierce. The search engines would compete fiercely with each other to connect the people searching with the content they wanted to find. Well, now you just have Google that's connecting you to the video you're trying to find, and that's it. Why couldn't Google have built a system where you could plug in?

your own search engine or other people could make search engines from the data. They could have done that, but they didn't. Because obviously, you know, if you want to be a trillion-dollar company, you want to keep control of as much as you can. Yeah, and you're subject to all sorts of, like, profit motives and political incentives and that. That seems to be the bigger thing to combat. But that's difficult for, like, any one company to do it. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about your background where you're from, what you were doing before you started Fudo. People are familiar with Rizib, but not with you. Don't not familiar with me.

Well, you were a gas. You've been on the show. I mean, they know you as like a geneticist and a poster. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's fair. Okay. Not in your new role as director of operations. Okay, yeah, so I guess, you know, as I grew up in Tucson, I had a computer and I, like, got to, I was the nerd, didn't have a lot of friends,

so I programmed. Programming has always been kind of what I like doing because, you know, it does what you want to, it does what you tell it to do. And it's your fault if it doesn't do what you're expecting it to do, actually, when you program. It's like a control thing. Yeah, it's kind of interesting, yeah. So when I was in grad school, I went to UC San Diego, and I was just kind of, I was just, the internet was just starting. I really liked a board game, so I built a little board game service where you could play games like chess or hearts or backgammon or spades or checkers, whatever, on the internet with your friends. So this would be an early, this is something I launched by myself in 1997. And it very quickly picked up Steam and I had like hundreds of people playing games.

Yahoo, which is, you know, kind of the proto-Google, I like to say. like Yahoo is the failed Google or if I get it really obscure it's the Count Fenring to Google's Paul Maudit he always hates it when I use that analogy What's that a reference? What is that a reference to?

So you know Paul in Dune Oh There's actually the Ben of Jesuit I know I literally know I know men like Dune Paul is the Messiah Yeah And he is the

He is the successful Messiah He actually took, and the Ben of Jesuit, a generation before Paul tried, and they created Count Fenrain, who had just not quite what they needed. Do you like David Lynch's Dune? I do like David Lynch's Dune. It's quite good. It's actually his most coherent film. I like it more. As weird as it is, I like it more than the newer ones.

But anyway, so back to, yeah, so Yahoo was, you know, I joined Yahoo. there was like a 500 employee company when I joined. And I was there six and a half years. I did Yahoo games, which was, you know, got very, you know,

we had like 10 million people playing every month at some point. Um, we had like, you know, nothing, we didn't, we weren't doing Doom or any kind of anything like, uh,

you know, triple, what they would call triple A games, but, you know, we were doing, we had a nice service people used. Um,

and then I left Yahoo. in 2004. And after that, I just, I had kind of plans. I started programming my stuff. World of Warcraft actually got released, though, like, that year, too. And somehow it captured my mind. Because, like, I could, the nice thing about World of Warcraft was you could, like, work really hard, and there was no bullshit.

I was like, if you worked really hard, you got everything you wanted, you know? like people would appreciate you like doing a good job there was no politics and there's hardly any politics in world of warcraft um like you would still have to be in a guild with like 40 people to get stuff done so there was big organizations but there was also very very clear clearly it was very clear who was pulling their weight and who wasn't so i kind of like that environment yeah but how did how did you end up um starting food oh from that um so Yeah, I mean, honestly, I just kind of did random gigs with my friends for many years. And that's how you made money?

I would, so, okay, so I left Yahoo with a decent amount of money because I was aquired by Yahoo. We were told that you were a billionaire. Is that true? Yes, that is true. How did you become a billionaire? Yes, that's what I'm getting. Okay. I guess that's a... Yeah, I mean, it's basic. I mean, so when I left Yahoo, I basically invested in companies that annoyed me. Like, if that makes sense. So I would invest in... even if I didn't use their product.

In fact, I invested in Google. I invested in Apple. I invested in Facebook. I invested in Tesla. Like just any, like, I've never, like, I was not an Apple person when I owned Apple stock. But I kind of could see how they were doing a good. So you made money investing in these companies and now you've turned against them. Yes.

I was always, I was always, I was always, well, it's, it's more of, hedging my emotional state. So I was really not happy with Microsoft in the 90s because they were like a big bully company. They were doing lots of anti-capital things. And I was like, well, now that I have money to invest, I know these companies are going to piss me off just as much as Microsoft, but at least I'll like tag along for the ride. And then also I would say a big thing that also helped was I invested in WhatsApp, which wound up getting acquired by Facebook. So that was a big, big, big, uh, windfall there too. So just kind of all accumulated over time. Um, my net worth

doubled every few years for 15 years, you know, yeah. Um, do you think that, um, American dream is still alive. Um, do you think that it's changed you in any way? Like, what's your mind frame? Um, anything like that? Yeah, the thing that changed, I think when I hit, I do have to say, When I met this guy, I met him four years ago. I think it was a party at a certain person's house that we actually hung out with yesterday here in Austin. And he was showing me something on his iPhone. And look, I was, I knew he was rich, but I wasn't like super cool. Wait, wait, no, I would know.

I had an Android. Oh, Android. How did you know he was rich because he was wearing flip-flops? No. Okay, there's some funny stories about that. But I'm good friends with his former director of operations, Ian Mason. He's like, oh, my, my. my boss is just this rich guy,

which I didn't know that you were the rich guy for a long time because the way he dresses, you know? But he showed me something on his Android, and the phone had, like, cracked screen. So it's like, this is how he lives. Yeah, I imagine that your personal expenses are pretty low. Yeah. Do you mostly just invest your money,

or you've thrown it into this company? So my goal is to eventually throw it all into this company. You know, we had to build our capabilities before. When did you start, Fudo? 2021. Okay. Yeah. And how did you link with Rzeeb?

Just in Austin, I think, you know, I started it with Ian in 2021. And Ian was trying to get me out of my shell. I was still playing World of Warcraft in 2021. Private servers, not the Microsoft crap. But I was, you know, Ian would try to get me out of, out and go to the parties, same kind of parties that Rizib was at, and that's where I met Riziz. Actually, there is, like, I'll just like put the lore explicitly, because it's kind of a funny story. In 2022, in September of 2022, my friend John Carney, who is an economics journalist at Breitbart

said that Alam Bokari had moved to Austin, who also worked at Breitbart technology at the time. And so I, he was like, you should have dinner with him, so I was like, okay. And so I messaged to him on Twitter, and he's like, let's have dinner. and then Alam was like, can I bring my friends? And so he brought, well, Ian was one of the people he brought. And then I got a message from Dick Hanania. And I didn't know that I was going to have dinner. Yeah, I got a message from him, actually.

I got a message from him. He was like, oh, I heard you going to have dinner with Ian Mason. He's lame. And I'm like, who the fuck is Ian Mason? Like, I don't even know. Like, I didn't know that he was going to have dinner with this guy. But anyway, Alam had told someone else a mutual friend, and he had told Richard. And anyway, so I became friends with Ian.

And obviously Ian works for him, so I would see Aaron around. I will tell you one really quick story. It was like at like the return, the magazine return back when Poulos was running it. At the party, I think most of the people there were wearing like dress shirts, some people wearing jackets. And he came in his drop box hoodie, I believe, in his flip-flops. And he was having some hors d'oeuvres. And it was, you know, kind of, you know, semi-fancy. And he looked definitely out of place.

And I was just like chilling with some buddies. and I heard the servers having a discussion whether they should go talk to that guy because he didn't look like he belonged there. I was just like, no, don't worry about it. He actually does belong here. They were like, well, I don't know. I'm like, don't worry about it.

He's rich. And they were like, okay. And I'm like, trust me, you're probably going to get in trouble with your bosses. So they like didn't bug him. I don't, nobody would, yeah. They would have been fine.

They would have been fine. You wouldn't have cared. Oh, yeah, I wouldn't have cared. He wouldn't have so long. I'm going to in and out. I'm just saying that the bosses would be like, you know how people are. Yeah.

So what is the Futo, like, is there a mission statement? I mean, the mission, there isn't actually an official mission statement. Or do we have an official mission statement? The conference is called Don't Be Evil. Yeah, don't be evil. That's kind of a play because that used to be Googles. That was actually in their documents even when they, when they, like, did stuff with Google. Yeah, our mission is to destroy Google and Apple.

and Facebook and like have them not be so powerful so and this is something that you feel like a ethical inclination towards it's a set like you're I guess I'm asking part of it's ethical yeah I see it as ethical because I do see a lot of dishonesty from big tech yeah in the way they relate with their customers but it is also just it's like I like I said earlier I feel it's like my mission my mission in life for whatever reason is like I can program I should be trying to do the best I can to make good, like to the extent that the world is having to deal with kind of this, this software ecosystem that is causing problems, that's partially my fault as somebody who's capable of writing software. So are you, I guess, are you motivated more by like a sense of justice or

duty or? Competitiveness, really. Like, I want to win. Like, but, but in a, like, in a fair way, you know, like, not, I don't want to be, I don't want to be winning. I don't want to be better at them, at screwing over the customers. I want to be better than them at making a good product. Do you think power ultimately corrupts? Like if you did become? No, I would do that. Back to Dune, power attracts the corruptible.

Yeah. Okay. I see. Power attracts the corruptible. Yeah. I think there is some, some of it is like, I would guess that a lot of these people, they just stop seeing themselves as being,

like on the same plane of existence with kind of like everyday people. I think when you get like in the position of someone like Mark Zuckerberg, you're just kind of like, well, these people are just, I control them. They're like, I've got my like strings connected to them. Some level of contempt for like normies or PCs. Yeah. And I think probably the autism is prevalent in the tech sector. It inhibits like an empathetic ethical business model from...

But you do... I mean, look, at the end of the day, I mean, Zuckerberg is where he is because he does know how to abuse... Like, he does kind of see the weaknesses in people. He'll give people these products that are very abusive that he would never have his own family, his own children using, right?

And he'll have them using it? I mean, have you seen the famous picture of Zuckerberg with a tape over the camera on his laptop? No. Yeah, so he does stuff like that. Like, you could probably... find it if you should people do be doing that um I actually don't do that myself uh I you know there's kind of a little bit of competition now in in big tech so Android and iOS

you know do try to make sure that a Facebook app isn't turning on the camera on you like just when you're randomly using your phone so those things are you know I don't like to be a tinfoil hat guy. Like, I don't think that, uh, I don't believe that if I have a Facebook installed on my phone, that when I'm not using the Facebook app, they're not going to have access to the camera. Or if I turn off access to the camera using the software controls on Android,

I trust that works. I don't even trust that, but I don't care. It feels futile. Um, but it's inspiring that you don't think that. I have a question. I have a question. There are people who are people.

that if you focus enough, put enough time, you can. You can shift. Yeah. I mean, if I, like Zuckerberg's does, the brain rot that this stuff can induce in children probably is more serious than kind of the tape over the camera. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, I have a question. I've noticed it's people remark on this phenomenon where sometimes you say a word like Levi's and then you go and look at Instagram and you get ads for

Levi's, is that because they're that ass listening to you? I don't, I actually, I haven't looked at this deeply. I always figured that's not actually happening and it's just a coincidence and people think it,

but maybe. Like it's because I did something else on my phone pertaining to genes. Something like that, yeah. I mean, I think you could test this if somebody really wanted to do a hardcore test. I've actually, because I talked to Pete,

especially if that's for me. And I've like made jokes. Like, a trainer like we're talking about like, well is it your time of the month now and like so we'll have all this conversation about like him may be needing as a joke like him may be needing some menstrual cycle products and to see if they they come up and they didn't come up so like we actually did some of these some of these experiments as a joke yeah I mean they should they would know that you're both male probably how would they know that by all the other data yeah I mean so it's not like they just remember men have to buy these products for their girlfriend. Okay, anyway, change something.

Fair enough. I don't like to talk about it. Sure. But also these technologies are, like, stupid and limited in some ways. I have a question about, like, AI that's really a question about, like, tech more broadly because there's always this discourse about AI that it will, you know, be apocalyptic and a doomsday in this kind of, like, cool Blade Runner sci-fi way where it'll take all of our jobs. The singularity.

Yeah. And I guess my sense is like if AI is soulless and scary and dangerous, it's in a much more mundane way because it makes, it's not so much that it's going to gain sentience. It's that it makes people less sentient because it deterrs people from like developing skills and brings more slop into the world, whatever. But should we really be worried about AI? Is it a little, is the hype a little overrated? I think there's nothing but hype with AI right now in both directions. I mean, clearly it is making people's jobs less important. An Uber driver is less important now as Waymo starts taking off, right?

You know, I used to always lament. You know, I used to always be like the guy who could navigate, right? And so as soon as smartphones come and everybody's got a smartphone that can navigate, I was like, oh, I suck. You know, I'm less important now because nobody needs me to help them navigate, right? So it's going to make a lot of people less important. And it could, I think it's going to increase the IQ necessary to have an impact that you might want to have in the world, right? So there's going to be a lot of people who are kind of maybe lower IQ who just can't do anything productive that they used to be able to do.

But isn't that already upon us? And is that necessarily a bad thing? I guess, like, I don't think it's totally overblown, obviously, that AI is going to take over some people's jobs and, like, render them obsolete. But it's mostly, like, low-skilled workers and, like, white-collar women. Lower and white-collar seem to be really good. And I guess my question for you guys is what happens to those people? Where do they go?

Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, I guess, you know, we have more and more people in this world who hired kind of like having trouble justifying their existence I don't know, yeah. But I mean, to be fair, like, you know, even within our lifetime, it's not necessarily yours because you guys are millennials,

it's like, you know, the number of secretaries, like, and what they did was radical. So those women, mostly women, they wouldn't got other jobs. So I think one of the problems. But there's only so many jobs if like a huge sector

of the working population isn't able, you know, not everyone is going to be able to find another job. I mean, depends on if you have a, I mean, the whole idea is to increase productivity, right? Yeah.

Look, I've been of the opinion that like 90% of white colored jobs for the last 30 years have been busy work. Yeah, they're bloated, bullshit. So can we find busy work for people? We're going to have abundance. We're, the AI, I mean, I mean, Peter gave a good talk yesterday. We are going to have abundance. We have abundance.

Okay, so we have busy work. for people and we trick them into thinking they're doing something important. But with the bad actors out there that are powerful, even if there is abundance, it doesn't mean that it'll be distributed. I think the problem is less technological than it's like political or social in terms of it could, I mean, you know, what's China going to do with AI and all these things?

They're going to create a massive surveillance state. And I think that's the problem. It's not that I no longer believe, or if I ever did, but I don't think that there's going to be, you know, singularity with artificial general intelligence in the next like 20 years where all of like human life disappears or something weird like that. Yeah, people think of this in terms of like some hostile AI, like Hal in 2001 a space Odyssey or whatever, like takes out humankind.

No, I mean, to me the thing that I don't like the most of the AI is the central, it makes the centralizing forces that we're fighting against at Futo more powerful. So AI is going to help big tech more than it helps little tech, I think. AI is going to help, like Rezeb said, governments do surveillance and governments have more control. So I don't like AI because of those things. At the same time, you know, we are trying to do everything we can at Futo to have local models running on your own computers that you have some more control over that are there for you. I don't the the terminator thing I think is ridiculous like it's always going to be a human who's in a group of humans who are in charge and they're going to be using AI to be more in charge than they

already are yeah I mean I think that's still scary the big takeaway I think is that um for all like the doominging and fear mongering AI is like a useful tool for already small smart already skilled people to like streamline their workflows and build stuff they want to build. Another question I have about the abundance issue is that like I think we are already in an era of abundance in the sense that like in the United States, for example, you're practically rich if you're a poor person, like as opposed to everywhere else. Yeah, that's what rich people used to do. So it seems like abundance is pretty evenly distributed. and I think the bigger issue that it creates is like some kind of existential or spiritual crisis among people. And that is true.

I mean, a lot of programmers getting ineffective by this actually, where they're like, especially like less capable, the less capable programmers are like, what's my point now? Because the AI is maybe better than me at this point. Right. And yeah, it's just, I don't know. people got to figure out their purpose in life, and it doesn't have to be, you know, what it was before it can change. We're not going to do it right up.

We can make some references to dood lore here, because that is like the premise of the Dune universe where humans were basically like, we matter and like we are in ends unto ourselves and we're going to abolish computing and artificial intelligence because they trivialize the human, you know, importance in the world. Sorry, who does that?

The Dune universe that Aaron referenced. Now you're getting nervous. Wait, receive, how many of those hats do you own? He's wearing a cowboy hats? Yeah. I have, well, I have, I have three hats that I rotate between.

You look like James Brown. Many hats. Go on. Yeah, I'm wearing a cowboy hat for the listener. You're like an Indian guy who's larping as a different type of Indian. I was confused as a Native American at a party recently. So I was born of a bowl of a little. You should get a long braid.

Yeah, because my hair is getting longer. Like several people when I wear a cowboy hat, like, wait, are you a native? And I'm like, I could be, you know? But anyway, in the Dune universe, there is an age of abundance, like in the lore, like in the deep, it's like, because of future history. And, you know, humans are basically just like allowing computers to do everything and they're fat and they're happy.

And there's a cultural revolution, basically, where people are like, you know, we need to do. to destroy the computers and destroy the robots because we don't do anything for ourselves and we have no purpose and what ends up happening is there's a conflict between humanity and the machines and in the end the humanity wins in something called the butlerian jihad which was led by a woman named serena butler and um they basically destroyed i'm so stupid i always thought that butlerian jihad was like some meme term that people for like feminine.

About Judith Butler and her adherence. Anyway, go on. Now, see, like this is a podcast has like totally transformed your view of a mean now. Yeah. Yeah, so they destroy, in the Dune universe, if you watch,

and a lot of the listeners will have watched the movie. In the movies, they have high technology, but like computers are replaced by something called Mentatts, which are human calculators. They're human calculators. You know?

And so humans basically, like, they're genetically engineering because they can't do that. But anyway, but they bred themselves, the Bedi Jesuit bred themselves, to replace a lot of the functions of computing, right? And that's because computing had taken, you know, the worth out of humanity. So, you know, science fiction has written about this,

and there's like all sorts of like scenarios, right? And we are, we're probably, yes, probably it's this century we're on the precipice of having to confront these issues. How do you see that taking shape or taking place? Like, how do you think that's going to go down? if you have to predict. In the United States in our world? Yeah.

I mean, I think we will have like some sort of, like, I suspect that in the next generation, like, you know, our current religious, like, you know, configuration of, like, Christianity and Islam and Judaism, you know, like, all these religions, they've been around for, like, over a thousand years, right? There hasn't been, like, a new great religion in a while. I suspect that there will be some sort of, it might not be, like, a new religion. It could be a new way to interpret Christianity. but I think it's going to mess

I'll just swear it's kind of mind fuck when when AI gets smart enough that like a lot of people would be like this is a conscious organism there was that I forgot it was like a tweet or something about

like women using like AI companions to give them like therapy and advice and emotion or like I mean there's many people fall in love with their AI yeah yeah I see that but those people seem brittle her yeah um do you think people are capable of religious faith in mass in this day and age

because they're capable of like religious fervor or um religious violence certainly they absolutely are okay uh if something like Tesla is a it's a religious call and Bitcoin to use some like non-traditional examples yeah though the people that are obsessed with Tesla or Bitcoin or believe in um I'm saying this is a Tesla showholder by the Elon, I mean, Elon's a big Dune fan, right? Elon and Grimes were big Dune fans. Yeah. Like, I've been to Grimes Place in Austin.

That's like there's a lot of Dune memorabilia. She loves that. She's always talking about it. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, he believes, and he's also worried about it. I know he's worried about the machines. Do you guys fuck with Battlestar Galactica? I loved that show. Me too.

I like them both. I loved, when I was growing up, I loved the 1970s version, and then I really loved the Donald Ronald Moore version. Yeah. That's the one I saw. So people like me who don't have tech literacy, are they kind of doomed? No.

I think you just make friends. Make real connections with real people and have some people who are tech literate in your sphere. I think that's the main thing. Okay, I would say something different. You know, they want to jump in because you were talking, but in terms of what kind of jobs can people do? I mean, you're creative, right?

Creative people, like artists have not to support. even though painters have not I mean okay there's not that many painters but painters are not disappeared even though it's photography my artists have not I can make it depends I think people will purchase things that humans make you know people will watch things that humans do even if like unless like you know unless you want to get plugged into a machine and live some artificial sensory existence you know and like just like pump up like you know well the right with the wGA strikes and stuff that's a big yeah point for that is like they want protections from my eye which I think is a little futile, delusional.

You've got to adapt to it. And also, if you're like a writer and you're worried that AI will take over your job, maybe you're not that good. Yeah, that's a one of a problem. I also think, I mean, Dasha had the best line about this, which kind of actually answers your question about how, like, it's not so much that AI cannot mimic human consciousness.

It's that it cannot mimic the human subconscious. So I think, like, authentic, original humans, whatever that means we'll be trading at a premium, right? Like if you're creative. Yeah, if you add value as a human being, you probably will continue to add value because at least like from what I can see currently, like so AI writing, for example, it's like B, right,

like, you know, it would be like a B essay. It's not an A essay, it's a B essay. I mean, in a way, maybe if you didn't know what AI was, but now that everybody does, you can always tell when something is written. We're adopting to it in real time. Like we had certain expectations and those expectations. The M dashes and all of that.

I mean, I'd also like to point out, like, I'm kind of not, I don't know, I don't want to pretend like I know what's going to happen. A plausible outcome, though, is like any day we could just realize, oh, the AI is plateaued. And it's not going to get any better than it is right now. Like, probably, maybe 20% chance, you know, AI never guessed to the point where, It can do anything that people are saying it's going to be able to do. It's really about it cheating at Scrabble. It's pretty, I mean... Chad GPT is not...

I mean, I feel like a computer was better. Well, that's just... I mean, that's... I kind of get disappointed with the AI researchers because they don't even focus on winning at games anymore. That was, to me, like, the cool accomplishments of AI. Like, when, you know, in the 90s when AI became the best chess player, or like I think 10 years ago

it became the best go player those were cool accomplishments and I'm sorry AI can kick your shit whatever you call it whatever you want it's not an LLM but Scrabble is gonna you're gonna lose you're just gonna lose to an AI Wait did it be Gary Kasparov?

Yeah that was in the 90s so That's cool he deserves it But I as a user As a consumer of someone who's trying to cheat At online Scrabble I put the screenshots into chat GVT And it like can't, it can't come up with words. It, like, can't even read the information.

It's worse than me. But that's only because LLMs are not good for playing games. But if you actually had, like, a custom-coded bot to play Scrabble, it would win every game. But isn't that, I mean, it's amazing that people, that chess is still as popular as it is. Yeah, it's kind of neat. I like this. So that's maybe a good point that like, you know, for whatever reason, chess is more popular now than it was 40 years ago before, you know, AI became the best chess player. So that's not just about winning. It's not always about winning, right? Right. I mean, like people still ride horses. People like to do things. The game. Love of the game. Yeah. What's your chess, Elo, do you know?

I actually don't like chess. So I've never gotten. The only game I play like that is I do play backgammon. because I programmed a backgamming game recently, so I was like, okay, I'll play backgammon. But I don't have the patience for chess. I just like... What about Blitz? You can play a quick one. Oh, I think you have to get good at not Blitz

before you get good at Blitz, though. Yeah, yeah. I play chess compulsively, but almost as like a... What's your real low? It's low. It's like a thousand. It's like not very good. She was playing it on the plane.

I think you would beat me. I'm like staring at the blank screen, and she's like going to town. watching Frasier. I'm playing chess. I have ADHD, so I have to do. So you're still enjoying, so I remember in the 90s, I was like, well, because I already kind of hated chess when that happened. So I was like, well, good. I'm glad I hated chess because, and all you people who still like chess are stupid because the computer is better than you. But I don't care. It's ignored. Yeah, it's fun for people to keep playing chess. How do you guys feel about Austin?

I guess he asked us that question. Yeah. I was talking, I mean, so I moved to Austin. more than 10 years ago now. What was the exact? I think you moved here. Like, did you move here a little earlier than? Yeah, I moved here in December 2015. What drew you to Austin? Honestly, so I am not, I'm a very introverted guy, so it doesn't really matter that much where I am. I honestly picked when I was leaving, I knew I had to leave California because I didn't, the reason why I had to leave California was, because I wanted to do things like futa with my money. I didn't want to give it to a corrupt government in California. So in Texas allowed me to do that.

There's several other states that allow you to do that. The taxes? Yeah. Well, what does that mean? They don't pay state income. We don't have a state income tax. We don't pay. Yeah, that's why people,

but people always say that as like a reason for why they moved to Austin, but you could hypothetically live in any city in Texas. Correct. He's not going to be lived in Dallas. Yeah. Why not? Dallas seems fun. I've never been there,

Because Dallas is where you want to live if you want like a big house in Plano with four kids and a wife with big blonde hair. It's a whole lifestyle. Yeah, that's fine. But I'm just like, this is not him. No, I know. You want to do tech? If you want to do culture and the arts, you come to Austin. Do you see any like commonalities between Tucson and Austin?

Funny enough, I think Tucson and Austin were about the same size when I was growing up. And it's amazing how much Tucson has faced. since then compared to Austin. Why do you think Austin has succeeded? Well, it's just like at the population itself. But just like we have an actual skyline. Tucson still has the exact same three buildings that were downtown that I had when I was growing up. I don't know why.

I mean, I would, there's like little things that I like about Austin, like having Town Lake. It's like a nice lake in front of, you know, downtown. You can ride your bike around it. That's really nice. Like that makes a big difference. Just having something like that. But I just, I'll be honest. I didn't know what I was doing.

I just knew I had to leave California. I kind of want to stay on the West Coast. I was really looking hard at Seattle area. But I knew one person in Austin, and I knew nobody in Seattle. So I'd make it to Austin. It was kind of like, yeah. I'm from the Pacific Northwest, and I don't personally perceive this, but enough Californians, partly it's because they're Californians,

but the people in Pacific Northwest don't like people from California. But people from California that move to Portland or Seattle often say there's, you know, Pacific Northwest, Free, Seattle Freeze. people are very insulated and they hang out with the people they grew up with, the people they know, from high school or college. And so it is difficult for Californians, from what I've heard, going to Seattle, for example, as opposed to Austin, where I feel people in Austin are actually very, very welcoming and very, very open. A lot of us are transplants, I think that's part of the issue. But I think, like, it must be just the native Texans themselves, because there are, you know, I do meet Austinites, and they're also, like, pretty, like, sometimes, when I first moved here in 2016, there was a lot of complaining about gentrification, but I don't really hear that anymore. People just given up.

It's like, okay, we're just going to- chatty and friendly. Yeah, we're just like, we're just going to grow. There's going to be newcomers, and as long as we don't change things too much, we've changed things some. Keep Austin weird. And the art scene has had some issues because tech money, you know. But it's funny that people find that to be a draw because, like, my criteria for moving

anywhere is that people don't talk to you. The idea of, like, moving somewhere people are friendly and want to talk to you. It's, like, terrifying. But both Tucson and Austin have, like, kind of burnout. tweaker, weird, quirky, deadhead energy, I guess. Slacker, Ethan. That's still here. It's in pockets.

Actually, there's certain, like, there's certain, like, shops that I've gone into where I'm like, wait, am I in Portland? Like, the vibe is, like, totally Portland all of a sudden. Whereas there's, you know, a lot of the, like, if you go to the domain, which I don't know if you guys know the domain, it's like, like, you know, towards the north where all the tech companies are. And it's like, there's a very Silicon Valley vibe down to, like, the fact that you're surrounded by, like, women in Salwar Camises, you know.

I'm sure. Do you have a prognosis for Silicon Valley? Like, why are there so many tech billioners in California when they could optimize, so to speak, in Texas? I mean, for me, it's so nice there with the weather and the ocean and the mountains. And then, you know, for me, it was like, okay, I've, you know, I went from Tucson to San Diego to Silicon Valley and I'm like, okay,

like there's nowhere to go now. I've made it to Silicon Valley. And then, but then, so that doesn't change. It's hard to lose that. It's not really hard to lose that. So it'll just be there forever. And the geographical advantages it's impossible. Like, Austin can never

replicate those things, unfortunately. It's basically California. It's like California's messing up a lot to drive people to Texas to be honest, but it is. Yeah. What's your sign? I think I'm Leo.

Yeah, Leo. Oh, nice. What day? August, I mean, August 18th. Okay. Great. So weird that you would be introverted. Our model keeps failing over and over again. I know.

Just like talk authoritatively about this and know nothing about it. I have another tech question. What percentage? of tech do you think is fake bullshit and where does the actual value lie? So, I mean, that's a continuum, right? Like there's how fake, 100% fake. If you're talking about the companies in Silicon Valley, not that much. Honestly, I've dealt with a lot more fake tech since I tried to like engage with the kind of the periphery.

like kind of the anti-establishment tech scene. 95% of the anti-establishment tech scene is fake, in my opinion. If you look at something like, I mean, I don't know. Like maybe I think I, maybe if you ask me like in a specific example, I can tell you how fake I think it is. But like obviously Apple is doing incredible products. Like Apple is doing incredible products like that. Yeah, why are you an Android guy?

So it's a real simple, you know, People ask that because I admire Apple so much for making a good product. There's one simple reason why I had to become an Android person early on, which was the side-loading of applications. So as a software developer, I was able to self-publish. When I did my game site, I was able to self-publish on the Internet. With the Android and iOS duopoly, you have to get their permission to publish your applications. But there is an, like, Android is like kind of smart because they actually do realize developers, you know, kind of like oppositional defiant developers such as myself, find that unacceptable.

So they have side loading. What is side loading? Side loading is basically, I can create an application and I can just give you that application. I could even send it to you like in a direct message and then you can install it. I can send it to you. You can download it from my own website. And then you can install it on your phone. and it'll try to scare you a little bit

before you try to install it on Android. It'll say, like, are you sure you want to install an application from an untrusted source, but it's still possible? And so that was, that's why I'm an Android. Like, that's it. Because Apple's just too, like, Apple's too controlling. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's impossible to succeed in the Apple ecosystem

without giving just a 30% tariff to them, basically, or whatever you want to call it. 30% of what you make. Are there any technological? that you admire? Yeah, I mean, the people who, yeah, there's people who build great things I admire. So in terms of, you know, I love Bram Cohen, Cohen, who invented BitTorrent, right? Like, that's, you know, one of the, you know, Satoshi, whoever that might be, obviously,

very admirable what those people are doing. Bitcoin? Bitcoin, yeah, Satoshi made Bitcoin. I just heard. I just learned about him. I'm learning a lot this weekend. Like yesterday. No, like today.

Someone just said his name. Well, okay, so last night at dinner, there was sort of a heated discussion about effective altruism. Oh, yeah. I was, yeah, what were they talking about? I guess the nature of the question was, do effective altruists believe, or do they just, believe they believe.

And like, are they religious sellets or are they larping? I was having this conversation actually separately, just with the no less wrong people or something. That's the overlapping. I didn't understand really what I had a hard time following, but the idea was that they are trying to overly regulate AI because they want to control it.

So they've convinced themselves that their purpose and I mean, it's kind of a cult, like we talked about religion, Right. So they've convinced themselves that, you know, it's their purpose in life to stop AI from the AI apocalypse, right? So I think they're wrong. And I don't think there's, I don't think their techniques are going to be successful. But do they really believe that, I guess? Or do they just want to control it? Oh, they definitely, yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, you look at open AI. It's hilarious, right? like it was all about Open AI was founded because they didn't want

Google to control AI and then so Sam Alman and then Sam Alton tries to control open AI and then Elon Musk is like oh well I should control AI and they're just fighting over who's controlling the AI and they're pretending like it's altruistic They don't seem like they are anti-AI They just seem like they want to like be gaykeeping

They're all fighting over who gets to control it It's really like a stupid question to ask whether they're like serious adherence to the faith or are just doing it to seem credible or for the clout or whatever. But my question is, is gatekeeping necessarily bad? It can, like anything, it's a, it can be good or bad depending on, you know, how it's used.

And why? Gatekeeping has, you know, been very effective for Apple with the, I was just complaining about the gatekeeping that the app stores do. It's clearly been very effective too at keeping a high quality of applications for Apple users. So, you know, it's So with the question of digital sovereignty and big tech overreach, I guess my question is like, what's the best case scenario and what's the worst case scenario? I mean, worst case scenario is, you know, we live in Mad Max future instead of Star Trek future, right?

So, by the way, Star Trek future is complete bullshit, but I like to call it the Star Trek mind virus that's something. some people are afflicted with. But anyway, you know, a future of abundance, maybe. It would be a better way to say it. That's the best case scenario. Yeah. So in terms of like what path gets us there, I have chosen a side. I've chosen a side of decentralization and trying to keep entities from getting too

powerful. Like that's kind of my philosophy. That's my side. I might even be wrong, but like I've chosen that side. Right. Like I, so I can, from my standpoint, I feel like, you get a more fragile civilization. If you have too much centralization of power.

And if you have a fragile civilization, then it can't recover from some potentially, you know, catastrophic event that maybe a less centralized civilization could survive. It's not anti-fragile. Yeah, exactly. But something like China, they're very centralized and hope to be more so.

And yet they seem strong. Until they're strong until they're not. It would be brittle. I always assumed, I thought they would be fragile because they have like a looming demographic crisis, right? But I mean, that's going to really kick in in like, you know, 20 or 30 years. They still have a lot of people. You know, like a lot of working age people. And what happens if they take Taiwan?

Well, I mean, I think they probably will, right? It'll probably be a. I don't know. Isn't that. Isn't that? Isn't that they were supposed to take Taiwan? Yeah. I think they're just, I think they're just playing.

in the slow, they're not going to have to take it. They just convince more and more people. They're disappearing. They just convince more and more. The generations do just decide they want something else over time. And so the Taiwan youth could very wind up being, again, this is where tech and soft influence can convince the younger generations just want to be part of China. And then there's no issue.

In America, do you sense a generational, because I sort of see it with Zoomers and, and I am millennials and I feel like when we started using the internet we had this really like you know every we just gave so much of our data because we you know early internet was so much about like welcome to Dosh's page and like here's all this stuff about me and I see younger people being less less willing to do that yeah that's a lot of info about you yeah but we were like yeah we just kind of like mindlessly did it unironic and sincere and we're like oh let's just uh tell people are tastes and preferences. And create a social network of similar gullible

retards. I think that nobody, we haven't really talked about this yet, but a huge anybody who's like doing electioneering for in like our Western democracies knows how to get the results they want by spending money on these things. So that's a huge part of it too is just you can get the result you want by influencing what people see

and, you know, making sure that you, the right people have their voices removed, things like that. What's the Fudo keyboard? Just a really simple thing. It's kind of the embodiment of what we're trying to do. So if you're using Android keyboard, you're sending all this data to Google as you type, or if you're doing voice recognition or voice prediction.

Android keyboard is just a way to interact with your phone and your applications without Google knowing what you're doing. It doesn't even have a connection to the internet. So Android keyboard only has a connection. to the application that you're using, that you're typing into. So if I have an Android and I don't have a photo keyboard and I'm like typing a note,

then Google has access to it? Yeah. Google said they don't have access to your, what you're typing, and they try to blind it. So there's all this cryptography that's going on, that some of it's real, some of it's not real. And they've published papers saying that, even though everything you type is being sent to Google,

that they're scrambling it in a nice cryptographic way. But voice to text, they're not. So if you're using voice to text, a keyboard is also responsible for voice to text if you use that feature. So in our keyboard, Fudo keyboard does both voice to text and text prediction. And we don't have a connection to the internet. We just want people, it's a very simple proposition. We made a keyboard for you.

We are hiring engineers. We try to make it as good as we can for you. Pay us for using our software. Are there any other products you'd like to? We're working on our polycentric product. This is something that's been in the works for a while. We've kind of had some stumbles, like finding the right engineers to work on it. What's polycentric?

Oh, yes. Budo needs engineers. I actually have good feeling about polycentric now because we have some new people in place. What is polycentric? So polycentric is what I feel like publishing should be on the internet. And the idea is basically instead of publishing to a specific platform that can censor you or manipulate you as a creator through, you know, instead, like a YouTuber gets quite a bit of guidance from YouTube about how to maximize their reach.

instead of that we just want people what we're talking about earlier we want people to just publish to the internet and create an ecosystem where there's lots of people creating ways for your audience to find you based on the fact that you just published it to the internet we are like truly the cloud

you publish something you publish it to multiple servers so you don't publish it to just one server you publish it to multiple servers as a publisher that just becomes a part of the public record instead of something that's inside you know Google's database that they can just delete or hide anytime they want it's part of the public record that you publish

this and how people who are interested how can they learn more futo.com is our site we've got a lot of information there you know we have an X account

we have an X account Futo underscore Tech Foto underscore Tech on X we publish, we do publish videos on YouTube because we're trying to reach the audience where they are, which is unfortunately on YouTube. So is it, is YouTube still? YouTube's huge, yeah, wow.

Yep, it's, it's, uh, I thought everybody was on TikTok now. Well, TikTok is harder to actually communicate with anybody and more than just silly, silly, uh, like, dances or whatever. So we, we do try to have substance when we communicate with, you know, people and so YouTube. is what we're using now.

We also publish to YouTube competitors as much as we can. They're very niche. They're YouTube competitors, but we do publish to them too. If you're here in Austin, we do our lunches every Friday. If you like programming, if you want to talk to other people who are working on tech and care about making good products, which is honestly, like, I've been very happy that we've found a lot of people like that, that are like me and just they want to build a good. good product for people. There's pride of workmanship, you know, you're, you're good at programming.

You shouldn't want to, you shouldn't want to build something for Google or Facebook. Because you don't need to. You should come to the food or luncheon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you should also be kind of like sad at what they've done to your work. I think. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, basically it's like, you know, you just, people have to sell out to some extent more or less, right? But it's like, you don't have to be happy about it, you know? It's just how it is. Okay. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you. It was great talking to you. Good luck with your ventures. If any of you listeners want to go work for Fudo, I would have to find them. It would be funny if a bunch of retarded e-girls show. I'll handle those. I mean, your listeners. Slide into Rzeeb's DMs.

You know, every... It is rare. You know, the people who can do this stuff are rare people. So not a lot of them. But they do all have friends. You know, they have friends who are listening to your podcast. Probably. They might be listening to your podcast sometimes.

You never know. You might be out. They might be out there. Yep. Okay. All right. See you now. Thank you.

Thank you. That was fun.